Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Even if god exists religion can't possibly be the way to god (self.showerthoughts)

submitted 6 months ago by bi_tux to c/showerthoughts

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So I thought about this in the shower amd it makes sense to me, like praying and stuff never worked for most people I know, so a direkt link to god gotta be unlikely. That made me conclude that religion is probably fake, no matter if there's a god or not. Also people speaking to the same god being given a different set of rules sounds stupid, so at least most religions must be fake.

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[–] Uruanna 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The gospels were dictated to someone who physically wrote the words down...

Oh wait, no I see the problem. Yeah at some point early scholars did get the timeline wrong and thought that the gospels were written 60 rather than 30 years after the death of Jesus. But there are TONS of holes in that theory - e.g. why not mention that the Jewish Temple had been torn down, which is like the largest event for them for thousands of years? I thought that this has been more or less universally debunked, but I could not swear to that especially for it to have permeated throughout the entire world.

Wikipedia both backs me up on that one point:

Most scholars agree that they are the work of unknown Christians[49] and were composed c.65-110 AD.[50]

While in the very next sentence also debunking my claim that they are first-hand accounts:

The majority of New Testament scholars also agree that the Gospels do not contain eyewitness accounts;[51] but that they present the theologies of their communities rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses.[52][53]

So if we use that article as a surrogate for "world-wide consensus", then it sounds like we both need to read up on our knowledge of this theology:-D. I for one am fascinated - does this mean that those "first-hand accounts" were merely written in the style of a first-hand account, but also including someone in the community who really was there (they would have been about 60 years old at that point?) - at which point, what is the difference, really? - or... maybe the people were older & feeble (in their 70s?), so merely the result of prior conversations with them over the course of a few years?

[–] Uruanna 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The "gospels were dictated by first hand witness" idea is a massive problem because that's not first hand account at all, that's actually someone claiming that someone else told him "dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you" (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that's just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says "I saw that myself" or "my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself", and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

I don't know about the timeline of the temple; I've heard it brought up before, but I haven't heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don't know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

(or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago)

Oh it's way worse than 50 years. One of the "direct" claims of writing was Josephus. With the text written 65 years after Jesus would have lived... and the next reference to text of [Josephus' writing on] Jesus being from 350AD... ~250 years later. With the actual direct references showing up 100 years later. So somehow we have a supposed account... That writer writing about it 250 years later write about... Just for what was mentioned to change 100 years after that. We literally have a documented accounting of the evolution of the text over time which couldn't happen if the original source was maintained.

Edit: omitted words I meant to type... In brackets above.

[–] frog_brawler 5 points 6 months ago

The majority of ~~New Testament scholars~~ people with an inherent pro-christian bias, that have dedicated their professional and academic lives to their religion, also agree that the Gospels do not contain eyewitness accounts;[51] but that they present the theologies of their communities rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses.[52][53]...